SCOTUS Might Be About to Mess With the Fair Housing Act
While we're all waiting for the Supreme Court to make some historic calls about key issues like gay marriage, here's another big one to keep in focus: racial discrimination in housing.
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While we’re all waiting for the Supreme Court to make some historic calls about key issues like gay marriage, here’s another big one to keep in focus: racial discrimination in housing.
More specifically, as Mother Jones noted Wednesday, the nation’s top court could soon make a move that might effectively gut the Fair Housing Act, which makes specific provisions to guard against race-based discrimination:
The timing couldn’t be worse: The nation’s housing affordability crisis is growing, according to research from the Urban Institute published last week.
Researchers found that in 2013, the last year for which data is available, no county in the US had enough affordable housing for its “extremely low-income” households—those making less than 30 percent of their county’s median income. Nationwide, just 28 out of every 100 extremely low-income households had housing considered affordable by government standards, renting at less than 30 percent of their income.
[…] A ruling that invalidates portions of the Fair Housing Act could hurt future legal challenges to a web of bank policies, zoning laws, and planning decisions that housing advocates argue make prosperous neighborhoods less accessible and affordable.
–Posted by Kasia Anderson
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